Seediq Bale is often described as a shi3shi1 史詩 – an “historical poem” – the typical Chinese translation of “epic.” The original epics were oral historical poetry, but orality and poetry are no longer essential features of epic. Maybe history isn’t essential either; epic is sometimes used with the simple meaning of “grand.” But I’ll be assuming a more complicated and interesting definition “a grand, repetitive mytho-historical narrative of conflict that begins in the middle (in medias res) captures the imagination of posterity because it bears on identity, both individual and collective.” It seems to me that Seediq Bale articulates an epic identity at odds with our modern notion of personal identity.

The most obvious meaning of epic is simply very long, and Seediq Bale is indeed very long. At four and a half hours, it is the longest Taiwan feature film by about half an hour. (Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer’s Day, to my knowledge the second longest, was a very different kind of film!). At a budget of 25 million USD it is the largest Taiwan production ever. The director Wei Te-sheng has plans for a three part epic treatment of Taiwan’s Dutch era (1624-1661), from Dutch, Chinese and Siraya plains aboriginal points of view. This would be another eight hours of epic filmmaking. After the theatres take their share of the gross, Seediq Bale is likely to remain in the red by a few million USD, so it’s not clear whether Wei Te-sheng will get the chance to make another epic film.

Seediq Bale also has many large battle scenes, involving large numbers of actors. The large battle scene is one of the defining features of the film epic. The way the battle scenes are filmed reflects an epic contrast of perspectives. Now we see the scene as a whole, from an objective perspective, now we switch to a close up in the heat of the action, from the perspectives of an individual hero.

Epics involve “epic machinery,” the world of gods above the world of men. In oral epic, the spirit world can be powerfully evoked, but film deals in images, and images of the numinous can be fantastical or just plain silly. It is usually better to suggest, not directly represent, the otherworld in a film. Seediq Bale tends to represent the spirits directly. Sometimes this works, as in the duet between Mona Rudao and the spirit of his father at the waterfall. Sometimes it does not work, as when the host of dead warriors appear walking on a rainbow cloud near the end of the film, first in profile, then head on. The CGI in the film, especially the animals, is generally pretty good, but the awfulness of the cloudborn warriors scene is universally acknowledged. The world of the gods in Seediq Bale is inhabited by the ancestors, which provides a justification for all seemingly objective shots, which is to say shots that do not represent the subjective POV of some character or other.

Like an oral epic, in which the same epithets are applied ad infinitum to fill out the metrical form, Seediq Bale is extremely repetitive. The violence of the film is repetitive, as in Homer’s Iliad. One could also complain about the repetitiveness of the (excellent) score and of the imagery. Mona Rudao’s CGI bird familiar appears half a dozen times, for instance. I don’t know how many times Mona Rudao mentions the rainbow bridge across which true men, men who have headhunted, can cross to reach the rich hunting ground of the afterlife – a dozen times at least. Repetitiveness is not necessarily a flaw in a work of art; it is arguably a feature of the epic form, especially since epic tends to be oral. Films are more oral than novels, and we tend to tolerate oral repetition more than we do in writing.

Starting in medias res is one of the defining features of the narrative structure of an epic. The Iliad starts not with the beginning of the war or the causes of the war but with the theme of Achilles’s wrath in the final year of the story. Seediq Bale starts in medias res with a scene in which Mona Rudao hunts a wild boar. But this scene is near the beginning; the only flashback is when Mona Rudao remembers his father teaching him about the traditional beliefs. Otherwise, the narrative structure of Seediq Bale is temporally straightforward. The action sometimes divides into several strands, but these strands proceed together in time and are linked by crosscutting.

Epics are stories of conflict that seem significant to posterity because of the role they play in identity construction. Conflict is after all a wonderful catalyst for identity, because it forces one to take sides. Some war stories are no longer significant for identity construction, because they seem somehow too far away, yet they still capture the imagination. The Spartan resistance to the Persian advance at Thermopylae, the story of 300 defending a pass against an army of thousands, is a good example. The most recent retelling of this story is the film 300. This film seems to have a lot in common with Seediq Bale. Like 300, Seediq Bale is a film that aestheticizes violence (by juxtaposing the breathtakingly beautiful sakura bloom with images of gore, for instance) and which was adapted from a comic book (see the cover of the comic book which inspired Seediq Bale below). I think Seediq Bale even alludes to the Spartan resistance. The Japanese general who leads the reprisal is stunned that three hundred indigenous warriors could resist thousands of highly trained troops of a modern army with planes, Howitzers, and poison gas.

But like an oral epic, and unlike a purely commercial film like 300, Seediq Bale seems to have a contemporary meaning. That contemporary meaning has to do with identity construction, both individual and collective.

First, what does the film say about individual identity? Mona Rudao’s concept of identity has a wonderful simplicity: he has an unambiguous external marker of his individuality. Like Odysseus, Mona Rudao bears a scar, a scar on his cheek as a result of a hunting accident. This serves as visual proof of his identity for everyone he meets. It allows the audience to identify Mona Rudao as a young man and a middle aged man – he’s played by two actors. His scar reminds me of Erich Auerbach’s great essay “Odysseus’s Scar.” Auerbach argued that identity in Homeric epic is externalized, in contrast to the internalized identity of Biblical narrative. Odysseus returned home after years of wandering and was recognized by his wet nurse because of the unambiguous mark on his thigh. Classicists and biblical scholars debate Auerbach’s interpretation; but it seems to me that “an unambiguous externalized identity” applies to Mona Rudao.

For Mona Rudao does not just have a single scar. He also has the scars of the tattoos on his chin and forehead. These scars attest to his status as a “real man,” a seediq bale, a person qualified to cross the rainbow bridge into the happy hunting grounds of the afterlife. These scars mark his status as an adult male, a warrior. How easy it is to tell a real man from a child, in Mona Rudao’s world!

In this respect Mona Rudao is an impressive but ultimately rather uninteresting character. His concept of identity is more status than identity. It’s either/or, and it’s externally marked. In Seediq Bale Mona Rudao relates to the child warrior Bawan Nawi that he visited Japan in the 1900s. He seems to have returned to Taiwan with only a technological concept of modernity. He knew the Japanese had powerful weapons, but didn’t get any idea of psychological modernity. His sense of himself remained ancient. According to Wei Te-sheng, he lauched the attack on Wushe as a headhunting ritual for a generation of young Seediq men who had not had the chance to become bale.

Mona Rudao’s concept of identity as externalized status is juxtaposed in the film with a more modern concept of personal identity. The most interesting example of a modern identity in the film is the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers, especially the elder brother Dakis Nobin or Hanaoka Ichiro. The brothers suffer from a more modern complicated idea of self. Born Seediq, they were educated to be Japanese. They were caught between Japanese modernity and Seediq tradition. In the film they are bullied by their Japanese colleagues and rejected by their own people. In this scene at the waterfall, Mona Rudao asks the elder brother to choose: are you going to the Shinto shrine when you die, or will you walk across the rainbow bridge?

Conflict catalyzes identity because it forces a person to choose, as if who you are is which side you’re on. The brothers want to claim both Seediq and Japanese identities. Nobody lets them. For them, the conflict becomes psychological, internal. In the end brothers can’t choose which side they are on. The brothers let Mona Rudao launch the attack against the Japanese at Wushe but don’t participate in it. They commit suicide together, one by seppuku, the other by hanging, the one according to Japanese, the other according to Seediq tradition.

Together they embody a modern psychological conflict. Alongside Mona Rudao’s unambiguous, lofty, epic concept of identity is a more confused, conflicted, contextualized idea of identity. The psychological conflicts of the brothers, which are conflicts of identity, enrich Seediq Bale. Yet they are not typical of epic. Epic conflicts are between sides or within a side, not within the individual. In the Iliad the Greek side spends most of the time fighting amongst themselves before they finally get their act together and defeat the Trojans by stealth. This might be called epic identity construction.

The notion of epic identity construction brings me back to the issue of Taiwan identity. The reader will recall that The Economist linked the film to Taiwan identity. It’s indisputable that the film is about identity. It even advertises itself as a comment on identity. The preview released at the end of August tells us right off the bat that we’ll be transported back to “an era of confused identities” (認同混淆的年代). People who know the story will think of the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers. They each had a confused identity. It’s clear that the film is commenting on individual identity. Is it also commenting on group identity, in particular Taiwan identity?

I think so, but in this respect Wei Te-sheng deserves credit for some degree of subtlety. Previous filmic or fictional treatments of Wushe have often overtly linked Wushe to Chinese and Taiwanese national identity. In his A History of Pain, the scholar Michael Berry has shown how Chinese nationalists saw Mona Rudao as participating in the national Chinese resistance against Japan (抗日), while Taiwanese nationalists viewed Mona Rudao as symbolically willing to defend Taiwan’s territory at the cost of his own life. Both kinds of nationalists identified with Mona Rudao and often inserted a Chinese or Taiwanese character who serves as Mona Rudao’s big brother or trusted adviser. In other words, in these works, there is Chinese or Taiwanese identification or close association with Mona Rudao and the Seediq rebels. This may remind students of American popular culture of the Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party and of James Fenimore Cooper’s oft-retold tale Last of the Mohicans. Americans also identified or closely associated with indigenous peoples, at an early stage of settler nation building.

There were Americans pretending to be ungovernable “revolting” Mohican Indians at the Boston Tea Party, and Leatherstocking, the main character in the works of Fenimore Cooper, America’s first national novelist, is bosom buddies with Chinggachgook. As the last of the Mohicans, Chinggachgook rather conveniently leaves the country to Leatherstocking’s people, the “Americans.” Seediq Bale, by contrast, is less overtly nationalistic. There are no Chinese or Taiwanese characters in Seediq Bale pretending to be Seediq or associating with the Seediq. In fact, there aren’t any significant Chinese or Taiwanese characters in the film at all.

That doesn’t mean that Seediq Bale doesn’t have anything to do with Taiwan identity. In the past two decades there has been an Wushe comic book and, inevitably, an album by the black metal band CthtoniC that went on to tour the States with Ozzy Ozborne. Both works come out of Taiwan nationalism, but in neither case is the link between Wushe and Taiwan identity made overtly within the work.

So what would a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation of Seediq Bale be like? The simplest nationalist interpretation of the film would be to identify Mona Rudao with a future Taiwanese leader and the Seediq rebels with this leader’s supporters. The Japanese would represent a potential invader. Let’s assume this invader is the PRC. To put it crudely or bluntly (and this is a crude and blunt interpretation) from a Taiwanese perspective, the film is, on this interpretation, saying that the Taiwanese people will defend their territory. They’d rather die than submit.

There are some problems with this interpretation. To begin with, if the Seediq in Seediq Bale represent the Taiwanese people, then the film seems to be saying that the Taiwanese public is hopelessly fragmented, because the Seediq in the film are hopelessly fragmented. Not everyone would rather die than submit. Mona Rudao was Seediq, but he didn’t lead a united Seediq resistance against the Japanese. Rather, he arranged a coalition of six Tkdaya Seediq tribal villages. Tkdaya is the name of a subgroup of the Seediq linguistic or cultural group. Mona Rudao was a leader of a Tkdaya village called Mahebo in alliance with other Tkdaya villages. Not all the Tkdaya villages participated in the Wushe Incident, only six of twelve. Other Seediq groups were antagonistic to the Tkdaya. The Toda Seediq, for instance, led in the film by Temu Walis, cooperated with the Japanese during the reprisal that followed the Wushe Incident. Not all of the Toda villages participated. The Japanese promised the participating Toda warriors so much money per Tkdaya Seediq head, and so the Toda went after the Tkdaya. In other words, Seediq Bale is a story about internal divisions more than an epic tale of anticolonial resistance.

Maybe the fragmentation in the Seediq body politic is not really an interpretive problem, because Taiwan’s body politic is hopelessly fragmented (which country’s isn’t?). At this point in the argument, some knowledge of Taiwan’s political scene is necessary. Identity, as opposed to social justice or the environment, has been the main political issue in Taiwan for decades, arguably since the Japanese period. After 1937 the Japanese implemented a policy of imperialization: everyone was taught to be an imperial subject. The KMT Chinese nationalist policy was similar: everyone in Taiwan was taught he or she was Chinese; the national myth was the reconquest of mainland China. Since the rise of a vocal Taiwan nationalism in the 1980s, identity confusion has become overt. There are some who feel they are Taiwanese and Chinese, some insist they are Taiwanese not Chinese. And with the missiles pointed at Taiwan, militant mainland Chinese rhetoric, and American vacillation, it’s not hard to see why identity is the main issue in local politics. If cross-Strait relations heated up, there would be a corresponding political polarization. At that time, through a process of “epic identity construction,” Mona Rudao’s either/or statement of status (“I am Seediq!) would come to seem even more compelling, and the Dakis/Hanaoka both/and idea of identity (“We’re both Seediq and Japanese…”) even more wishy washy.

Unfortunately, the ending of Seediq Bale does not give Taiwan nationalists cause for comfort. That’s the problem with choosing this particular historical incident as a nationalist myth, because the ending is predetermined by the history of Wushe: the Seediq lose. If we’re applying a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation to the film, whatever would this ending mean? In the film the warriors of the rainbow reunite in the afterlife; we see them striding on the clouds. This is hardly going to satisfy people for whom Seediq traditional belief is not a living religion. The fact is that almost everyone dies. Maybe like Achilles they die gloriously, but maybe it would be better not to die. Unlike Homer’s Iliad, Seediq Bale does not have a happy ending from the protagonist’s persective. And we can’t argue that Wei Te-sheng is telling the Taiwan people: this is what will happen to you if you don’t unite. If the Seediq in the film – all 12 Tkdaya tribes plus the Toda tribal villages - had united against the Japanese, the result would have ultimately been the same.

At the end of the film, four hours and twenty minutes in, we are reassured that the Seediq people have not been wiped out; they will recover. They will have Seediq children and those children will have children. But when you think about this, it’s not all that comforting. Those children would grow up under the Japanese and those grandchildren would grow up under the Chinese. Last time I checked Taiwan was not postcolonial from a Seediq perspective, because the Taiwanese people who like to identify with the Seediq – like the Americans who identified with the revolting Mohawks in 1775 – are running the island. So ultimately I still resist a Taiwan nationalist interpretation of the film. The Wushe Incident has to be understood in terms of 1930. I don’t think it has much to teach us about Taiwan identity today. The collective identity the film seems to express does not seem, as The Economist puts, empowering, certainly not in a contemporary context. There is a collective action in the film, but the action is doomed to failure and only half of the collective participates in it. Epic identity is impressive, but the modern, wishy-washy identity also has its place. Epic requires conflict; I pray for peace.

Maybe Wei Te-sheng does too. On a talk show Wei Te-sheng said he realized the film was about a conflict of belief, the people who believe in the rising sun and the people who believe in the rainbow bridge. What if the Japanese and Seediq, Wei naively wonders, had realized that the sun and the rainbow hang in the same sky, in the same heaven? Maybe it took the Wushe Incident for them to realize it. I hope it doesn’t take another incident for us to realize the same thing today.

It seems to me that rather than declare the mainland Chinese presence in Finding Sayun irrelevant we should try and make sense of it.

So what does the Chinese presence in Finding Sayun mean? Yukan, the “star” of the film, hopes to go to university, perhaps in Taipei, but if he is a good enough soccer player he might end up in China. There are a roughly million Taiwanese people in China – about 3-4% of the population – and Yukan might eventually join them. China’s part of the lives of Taiwanese people, including aborigines. Or Yukan might end up somewhere he’s never heard of. At the same time, Taiwan’s aborigines have become part of the lives of the people of the PRC, initially through broadcasts of Teresa Teng’s rendition of the song “Gaoshanqing” (High Mountains Green):

高山青 High mountains green

澗水藍 Blue rivers rill

阿里山的姑娘美如水 Maiden of Alishan, lovely as a stream

阿里山的少年壯如山 Young man of Alishan, solid as a hill

The mainlanders go to Alishan, and why shouldn’t they go to Nan-ao? Chinese tourists will tend not to be very sympathetic to indigenous causes in Taiwan. According to the PRC, Taiwanese indigenous peoples are not indigenous peoples at all; they are collectively the smallest of China’s fifty-five official minorities, the gaoshanzu. The PRC can happily approve the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples because the PRC calls its indigenous peoples “national minorities.” The claim that Finding Sayun is Taiwan’s first film by an indigenous director could only be made on the Taiwan poster.

But I don’t wish to drag cross-Strait politics into this discussion of Finding Sayun. The point being made in this film is that things Taiwanese, including Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, are on Chinese people’s radar, and vice versa. The film “builds bridges” as the cliche has it, represents Taiwan’s indigenous people (or more specifically the residents of the village in Nan-ao in which the film was made), to themselves and to outsiders in Taiwan, China and possibly the rest of the world. Better for curious outsiders to learn about Taiwan’s indigenous people by watching a film like Finding Sayun than a film like Waiting for the Flying Fish. Tourism is part of the marketing strategy of the former; the latter seemed like feature length tourist brochure.

If Laha Mebow seems to be wearing rose colored glasses in Finding Sayun, she put them on herself. There is unhappiness in the movie, but it’s focused on the young widow and mother whose husband dies at the beginning of the film in a work-related accident. She becomes a symbol of indigenous suffering. (Indigenous peoples tend to work in DDD (dangerous, dirty, degrading) jobs, if they can get jobs at all; indigenous unemployment has risen as a result of the “guest workers” policy.) Finding Sayun is otherwise a generally upbeat, positive film. It’s described as a 溫馨片, a “heartwarming film,” which seems to be a film genre. But given the incredible variety of indigenous experience, negativity can’t be one of the criteria for the determination of where a film is on the indigenous continuum or whether it’s authentically indigenous. Rather than arguing that Finding Sayun is heartwarming out of generic conformity, it’s just as convincing to argue that it’s upbeat because Laha Mebow wanted to share a positive vision of her own people.

In the end the Chinese director’s film, the film within the film, does not get made. Finding Sayun, the indigenous director Laha Mebow’s film, is a work of which the director and her community can be proud.

In an article on the recent Orchid Island film Waiting for the Flying Fish, which is about but not by Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, Prof. Anita Wen-hsin Chang called for funding for local films by indigenous directors. Finding Sayun, directed by the indigenous woman Laha Mebow, claims (on the film poster) to be the kind of film Prof. Chang has been waiting for: a local film with an indigenous director. Therehas been significant indigenous involvement in other films, including this year’s “epic” about the Wushe uprising in 1930, Seediq Bale. A better example is The Sage Hunter, starring the Taiwan indigenous writer Sakinu and based on his writings.

If Finding Sayun is Taiwan’s first indigenous film, it is Taiwan’s first contribution to the growing corpus of global indigenous film. According to Houston Wood, the author of Native Features: Indigenous Film from Around the World, the first indigenous film was Richardson Morse’s 1972 adaptation M. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn. The first feature by an indigenous woman was the Australian Tracey Moffat’s beDevil in 1993. A Chinese/Atayal language indigenous film with limited distribution (even in Taiwan) like Finding Sayun is not likely to make it onto the radar of a scholar like Wood. This is not a criticism of Wood, who had his work cut out for him trying to cover indigenous films in English speaking countries.

But what does it mean to claim that a film is indigenous?

It seems to me we have two ways of determining whether a film is indigenous, by a continuum and making an either or determination. There is a kind of continuum from non-indigenous representations of indigenous peoples to indigenous representations of indigenous peoples. Features such as screenwriting, cast (are the actors indigenous?), crew (especially whether the film used a “community production” model, involving local people in production), direction, production, the language of the film, and the content – whether it conforms to Hollywood expectations, whether it is an authentic presentation of local people – place any given film somewhere along the continuum.

At the same time it’s still meaningful to claim that a certain film either is or isn’t indigenous. The boundary separating indigenous film from non-indigenous film is fuzzy; in most cases the determination will seem straightforward, while in others the film will seem to sit on the fuzzy boundary and there will be more room for debate. When push comes to shove, the either or decision is usually made based on the identity of the director: if the director has an indigenous identity that is accepted by an indigenous community, then it’s an indigenous film.

This approach assumes an auteur theory, spotlights the role of the director in the making of the film and leaving the rest of the production in the shadows. Some auteurs might be able to do everything they want, but most directors aren’t in this position. They have to negotiate their visions with writers, actors, investors and distributors, and of course with the public as well. An indigenous director would have to negotiate with the local people and with the indigenous community. As a result of this hidden complexity, we must be careful interpreting films we accept as indigenous in the either or sense because they have indigenous directors. Wood argues that the producers of the first “indigenous hit” Smoke Signals, as well as Mirimax, the distributor, put pressure on the director Chris Eyre to provide a feel good ending resulting from the positive attributes of the main characters. In other words, they pushed for conformity to Hollywood expectations. This puts the authenticity of the film into question. This makes one wonder about Finding Sayun, especially because of the unexplained mainland Chinese presence in the film. I’ll address this issue in a separate post.

Finding Sayun is a superb new anti-aboriginal romance film by Laha Mebow (陳潔瑤), a Taiwan indigenous director. The film revisits the 1943 Japanese propaganda film Sayon’s Bell about an indigenous girl from Nan-ao, a “rural township” in northeastern Taiwan, who drowned trying to carry luggage across a river for the man she adored: a departing Japanese officer. (Sayon and Sayun are two different transliterations of the same name.) Sayon’s Bell wanted to reassure the Japanese public that, a decade after the Wushe uprising in 1930, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples had been converted to imperial subjects, and to convince aboriginal braves to fight for the emperor: it would be hard to resist after hearing Sayun singing the inspiring Song of the Taiwan Soldiers:

After the Second World War, the KMT relocated Sayun’s people from their old mountain village to a new village on the plain. Laha Mebow is one of Sayun’s people, and her new film is ostensibly about finding Sayun, but finding Sayun is not the point of the film. Instead, Finding Sayun has two aims: 1) to critique the use of romance in aboriginal films (which is to say films about but not by indigenous people) like Sayon’s Bell, and 2) to document the everyday worlds of three different generations in a contemporary indigenous village.

Avatar is only the most flagrant example of an aboriginal romance film in the past few years. In Taiwan, Song of the Spirits (心靈之歌) was about a Chinese man who falls in love with an indigenous teacher (played by a Chinese actress) in a remote mountain village, while Waiting For the Flying Fish (等待飛魚) reversed the formula: an indigenous fisherman falls in love with a swimming teacher from Taipei. How does Finding Sayun critique the use of romance in aboriginal films? First, by questioning the story told by Sayon’s Bell. Sayon’s Bell was very loosely based on a true story, a news report from 1938. Sayun’s death was celebrated as an example of imperial devotion, and a bell was erected in her honor. Sayon’s Bell introduced romance: the actress who played Sayun, Shirley Yamaguchi, acted in many Japanese imperial romance films. In Finding Sayun, episodes from Sayun’s life are reimagined several times as a “student-teacher romance” (師生戀) in sepia-filtered video:

This preview switches back to regular coloring when it returns to the present, and in the end the skepticism of Sayun’s people in 2011 interrogates the “student-teacher romance” idea. One person suggests that Sayon was carrying the luggage because she had to, while another says flat out that romance was Sayon’s Bell’s spin on Sayun’s story.

Finding Sayun also critiques the use of romance in aboriginal films by introducing a young Taiwanese casting director character who goes to Nan-ao to scout talent for an aboriginal romance film. She video auditions the local people and asks the most videogenic among them to star in her film. She even finds a high school student named Sayun! – Sayun turns out to be a fairly common girl’s name – as well as a boy named Yugan who is fond of Sayun. So far so good. But Yugan refuses to act in her film, and Sayun has her priorities straight: she’s too busy studying for the high school entrance examinations to fall in love, let alone act in a movie. As a result, the commercial aboriginal romance film does not get made. But through the device of the film pre-production within the film, Laha Mebow has already made the audience more self-conscious about how a typical commercial aboriginal romance film is constructed, and hopefully more critical of commercial filmmakers like James Cameron who cash in on a simple formula: nature+aborigines=romance, sometimes as pure entertainment, sometimes as an ideological vehicle. Yet Laha Mebow’s criticism is warm-hearted, and not heavy-handed. Indigenous peoples might well feel some hostility towards outsiders who want to commercialize their cultures, but the young Taiwanese casting director character in Finding Sayun is very likable and even somewhat perceptive. She’s not exactly a visual ethnographer, but she has a notion of “participant-observation” – she hangs out with the people in the village and adopts local customs, such as wearing rain boots (she’ll need them on the trek up to the old village).

So what kind of story does Laha Mebow offer instead of aboriginal romance? At first, there is no strong narrative line, and the casting director’s efforts soon fizzle out. Yet not every feature film needs to have a good story, just as plot is not the point of every novel. Initially, Finding Sayun seems like a fictional documentary evoking the everyday lives of three generations in contemporary Nan-ao: 1. Young indigenous students like Sayun and Yugan hoping to get into university and do something with their lives out in the wider world. Sayun plays the organ in church and Yugan is a hunter who hopes to get into college on the strength of his soccer skills. 2. Their parents’ generation tend to engage in low-pay high-risk labor, and one man actually dies in an accident at the beginning of the film (his death caught on camera by the casting director), leaving behind a wife and son to cope as best they can, relying on the support of others in the community. 3. Their grandparents’ generation has never been to the big city; rather than the wider world, their minds are on the old village. Yugan’s Grandpa, one of the original Sayun’s classmates, takes Yugan and the casting director on a final trek back up to the old village. On the way, he jokes around, saying that the original Sayun was his girlfriend so many years ago, but when he reaches the old village the only words he has are for his mother and father, for the ancestors.

Grandpa’s return to the old village is the closest thing Finding Sayun has to an Aristotelian plot with a clear beginning, middle and end, but instead of an aboriginal romance that is consummated in accordance with audience expectations, Finding Sayun gives us a web of unfinished, ongoing, interrelated stories of people in the community. For the most part, these stories are presented not through seamless, continuity editing but rather documentary style. The casting videos seem like part of a “making of” or “behind the scenes” documentary for the commercial aboriginal romance that never gets made, and the shaky footage of Grandpa’s final homecoming is filmed on a consumer video camera. Shot in standard professional quality video, the other scenes – going to church, going to school, swimming in the waterfall pool, hunting, having a drink at the bar, playing ball, chasing pigs – have some sort of ethnographic significance.

Laha Mebow’s film is an community-oriented anti-aboriginal romance film with a documentary aesthetic. That might make it sound a lot less watchable than Avatar, but in addition to being informative, Finding Sayun  is also appealing. It is poignant (without being sentimental) and very funny. It’s worth going out of one’s way to see. See it while you can!

Note: the Chinese name of Finding Sayun is “Light of a Different Moon,” which opens a page in Taiwan’s film and pop music history. In 1941 a Japanese language song called “Sayun’s Bell” was released (listen for the sound of the bell). This is the song grandpa sings on his last trek up to the old village. In the 1960s the song was remade as a Mandarin pop song called “Moonlight Nocturn.” This is what the title of the film is referring to. But Grandpa’s version is best, sung to the light of a different moon.

Note: I’ve gone and written two other posts on the film, one on the mainland Chinese presence in the film, the other on the definition of indigenous film.

Books for children can, on occasion, offer a clarity into underlying issues that belies their apparent simplicity. In the introduction to the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom, Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seizes on this:

Whatever the vicissitudes and deformations of Lacan in cultural studies, one should focus on what happens with children in their early age, following the wise Jesuit motto, “Give me a child till he is seven, and afterward you can do with him whatever you want.” So I am tempted to claim that there is hope for us Lacanians as long as American children are massively exposed to Shel Silverstein’s two classic books, The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O; one is almost embarrassed by the direct way these two books render in naked form the basic matrix of the Lacanian opposition of desire and drive.

I too have felt the profound touch of picture books like Leo Lionni’s treatise on epistemology and the non-translatability of experience, Fish is Fish, or Jon Muth’s tranquil and enlightening, Zen Shorts. Kids’ books are big business and tenure track positions are getting harder to find. Maybe there are some anthropologists out there who want to get in on this genre?

With the AAA’s push for a more “public anthropology” we might consider too the role our discipline can play in K-12 education. I’m not talking about the anthropology of education or an anthropology of children like the work being done by the good people at the CAE, which is in itself fascinating and, of course, vitally important given the politicization of ed discourse in the public sphere. But, imagine instead an anthropology for children. Maybe there’s a CAE person reading this now who can add to our discussion, are there anthropologists out there right now writing to children?

There are a number of kids’ books that brush up against anthropology or that invite one to interject an anthropological spin on things. At my house we have a slew of these “people around the world” type books (all of them gifts), including ones on bread, shoes, houses, and families. The DK Eyewitness series offers beautiful picture books on archaeology, mythology, Indians, classical ancient societies – Egypt, Greece, Rome, the biggies – even evolution and early humans (or as my kids call them “Monkey People”). The archaeologists already got Indiana Jones and Laura Croft. With cool how-to books like this one they need someone to move into Bill Nye territory.

Granted works like the DK series are commercial productions for the kiddie book market. They’ve no doubt got academics serving as consultants or fact checkers, but most of the creative work is done by graphic designers and copy writers who know how to make books that kids want and that parents will buy. That’s why I find the two works I’d like to discuss today so interesting. They are artistic works of scholarship and experience, creatively rendered and engaging to young people. For any anthros wanting to write for children, here are some role models

Journey to Cahokia: A Boy’s Visit to the Great Mound City by Albert Lorenz with Joy Schleh is a production of The Art Institute of Chicago. The book opens with a map and a note emphasizing the interconnectedness of long distance American Indian trade routes. This sets an academic tone and situates our story around 1300 CE. The story follows the family of a boy named Little Hawk as they journey from their small village by Lake Erie on a trading mission to the great city of Cahokia far to the west along the eastern shore of the Mississippi.

The first scene opens on a tableau, the illustration done in watercolor over ink lines with some colored pencil mixed in. We see a village of wigwams surrounded by a stockade, one hut is shown in cut away so that we can see women tending to children inside. Along the shores of the river men smoke fish, build canoes, and prepare to disembark. In the next page our gaze zooms in closer and we can inspect more carefully the gendered division of labor. The whole process of pot making is shown: one woman crafts the pot, another is ready to paint, a girl carries firewood, a fire is being built with finished pots inside. Men have returned from the hunt carrying rabbits and turkeys.

As Little Hawk embarks on the trading mission to Cahokia a crew of about twenty join his family in five canoes. They row past raised mounds, stop to share a story of Red Horn, survive a raiding party, and are awed at their first sight of Cahokia – a city of 20,000 dominated by a huge mound. Here Little Hawk witnesses a game of stickball. The men notice that the Cahokians dwell in houses made of wattle and daub, and the women see them tilling their gardens with hoes and ask to trade for the tool. In the marketplace there are a great many wares to see from masks and sea shells to woven belts and pottery.

Then the story breaks. Across a two page spread the story yields to photos of artifacts – arrowheads, a ceremonial drinking cup, a dancer’s mask, and a pair of earspools – set beside detailed descriptions and illustrations of people using them. The story resumes on the next page as the villagers join a massive crowd at the base of the principle mound. A “coronation” is taking place, with a religious official bestowing a symbol of authority upon a political official at the top of the pyramid. Finally the travelers bid Cahokia farewell. They load the canoes to depart.

Journey to Cahokia is rather sophisticated for a kids’ book. One can imagine it shelved with non-fiction though it’s entirely narrative in its structure. The sentences are long and the vocabulary is advanced. It has a clear purpose to educate its readership about the people of North American Midwest prior to the arrival of Europeans.

I wasn’t thrilled about the way it represented the political structure of Little Hawk’s village or the “coronation” of the leader of Cahokia, both of which projected a centralized authority where one may not have existed. But these are minor quibbles. The book does a great job of imagining what everyday life was like among the people of the Ohio River valley, even showing a diversity of lifeways from village to city.

The Indian people in it are exquisitely illustrated. I recall a Nez Perce costume designer I interviewed for my dissertation on a major theatrical production staged on an Indian reservation. He vehemently dismissed the primitivist look of buckskin costumes as they are frequently seen in movies. “I refuse to believe that my people couldn’t cut a straight line,” he said. The characters in Journey to Cahokia, by contrast, are well dressed. The women modest, the men fabulously tattooed. They cut a straight line.

I read this to my three year old and, much to my surprise, she was really drawn into the story despite its slow pace. “I see the people!” she exclaimed. The artwork is quite beautiful and each scene is a panorama with a single illustration spread out over two full pages. My seven year-olds were able to read it independently and the more enthusiastic reader of the two went through it three times. She remarked to me, “I didn’t know Indians built pyramids.”

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Jingle Dancer is by Cynthia Leitich Smith, with illustrations by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu. This is much more a conventional story-time type children’s book with the rhythmic repetition of actions and phrases. The language has a gentle, poetic quality. It’s not in verse per se, but rich in metaphor and sensorial description. Our story follows a Muscogee girl named Jenna, maybe ten years of age, who aspires to be a jingle dancer at the next powwow but doesn’t have a dress. She practices her bounce steps, talks to her Grandma, and visits other female relatives and neighbors. From each woman she asks to borrow a row of jingles until she has enough for her dress and can dance Girls at the powwow in their honor.

The art work in Jingle Dancer is stunning. Bold and rich watercolor over the faintest charcoal lines. I have not seen finer watercolor in a children’s book. My guess is that the creative process began with the illustrator working from photographs of actors, a common technique for producing cinematic realism in comics.

What makes Jingle Dancer stand out is its consciously contemporary setting. When Jenna practices her bounce-steps she does so by watching a video in the family living room. When she begins her quest for jingles for her dress, she embarks wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers. As she walks down her suburban street the houses are clean and modern. The women she meets along the way are independent, successful and live in fine homes.

By virtue of its contemporary-ness, this is a story you could share with a non-Indian girl who is “into” Indians and have her come away with sense of living Indian people. It is also a story that a modern Indian girl could read and find something relevant and recognizable from her own life reflected back to her. What a lacuna to fill! Kudos to the author and her team for producing such a unique and positive book.

Like the best family-oriented children’s stories, Jingle Dancer has a sweet heart that features loving relationships among children and adults. It’s hard not to get a little weepy reading it. The three year-old liked it okay, but the seven year-olds were totally fascinated by it. I often remind them when they learn about Indians in their social studies class (which always cast tribal people in the past) that they once lived on a reservation. These memories from when they were two and three lie just outside their grasp. Now they’re asking me to take them to powwow and buy them a frybread so they can see the girls dance jingle.

Alison Bechdel crashed the party on American literature’s main stage with Fun Home (2004) a stunning graphic memoir about coming of age, coming out, and discovering her father’s own closeted gay identity. It received rave reviews and was featured at the top of a number of end of the year best book lists and, with the close of the ’00s, reappeared on some best of the decade lists. And rightfully so, there wasn’t a more monumental nonfiction comic book in a decade that will be remembered for an explosion in top notch comic output. There hasn’t been a more significant comic memoir since Maus (1986).

My own encounter with Fun Home began on the Eastern Band Cherokee reservation as I was conducting the ethnographic field research for my dissertation. I was cast in a theatrical production as a soldier in Andrew Jackson’s army and one of my fellow Indian killers was a bohemian epileptic artist named Pat working his way back to Florida from Knoxville. Like Capote’s villain from In Cold Blood he traversed America’s highways with a library in his trunk: Zizek, Baudrillad, and a borrowed copy of Bechdel’s novel.

After I settled in Newport News I discovered Fun Home in the stacks at my public library and got hooked on Bechdel’s beautiful ink lines, hyper-literary self reflection, and slightly neurotic gallows humor. I was anxious to get my hands on more of her work and I soon learned I had a lot of catching up to do. Before achieving celebrity status Bechdel was already a star in the gay and lesbian community for her biweekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, first published in 1983. A nearly 400 page retrospective was released in 2008 as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Our story begins in 1987 and the dykes, a tight knit cast of regulars, are late 20s to early 30s. There’s Mo, a moral hypochondriac who is always in such a tizzy over Republicans, U.S. militarism, the melting ice caps, or capitalism that she hardly has the will to score a date. Lois is a horny free spirit, casually jumping from relationship to relationship and bed to bed. She shares a house with Ginger, a grad student in literature with a persistent fear of commitment, and Sparrow, who staffs a women’s crisis center and is always caught up in therapy-speak. Then there’s Clarice and Toni who are in a serious long term relationship and upwardly mobile, they’re the first to get a house and the first to have kids. But domestic bliss doesn’t last long and soon their relationship is in trouble.

Their lives, always dominated by their politics and their relationships, are frequently hilarious. In a five lesbians in a VW Bug on their way to a march in DC kind of way.

As a non-lesbian, non-woman I found there was a lot for me in Dykes. All the women are smart, engaged, and driven by their passions which makes for really interesting characters by any measure. Frequently academics provides a backdrop to their lives as Clarice completes law school, Ginger graduates and becomes a lecturer, and Mo starts dating Sydney, a Women’s Studies professor. There are the familiar humiliations of romance, dating, cheating, moving in together, young parenthood – as Dykes cycles through these topics they always seemed fresh to me. No doubt because lesbians live these experiences with a degree of political consequence I don’t have to confront. Finally, much of the story plays out in the ‘90s – my salad days – and so I was rewarded by a bit of nostalgia too. I’ll come back to this last point later.

This reading experience was accompanied by a sense that a lot of the subtext was over my head. For one this is a book about lesbians. It is not a book about women. It is not a book about gays. They’re all lesbians and there is a gap between what I can recognize of myself in this other and what it’s intended audience finds. It’s an intentional inversion of what has been known as the Bechdel Test and I’ll fess up that it was disorienting, albeit in a good way.

As one critic pointed out Dykes to Watch Out For is a chronicle of lesbian history in America over the past two decades as trends and debates (not to mention electoral politics and their consequences) have consumed the community. “Alison Bechdel has put her finger squarely on the Dykegeist,” she writes. Do I have to tell you I don’t know what the Dykegeist is? (It sounds awesome though. Dykegeist!)

Taken as a whole the book is rich in its themes and topics. Here I’ll mention just two that resonated with me: the fall of the independent book store and ambivalence over the mainstreaming of queerness.

Since I was a child I have loved bookstores. There was a moment in time, growing up in Austin, that the city was awash in independent and used bookstores. As soon as I had my license I was driving from one to the next, browsing the stacks and drinking coffee. Life for the Dykes revolves around books too, their community is built around Café Topaz and Mad Wimmin Books where Mo and Lois work. Mad Wimmin hosts their poetry readings, it’s their third place.

Things get tight financially in the mid 1990s when cutthroat capitalists like Bunns and Noodles and Bounders Books and Muzak (not to mention Medusa.com) start to cut in on their bottom line. Somewhere along the way Mad Wimmin starts selling vibrators and lube – not sure how that happened, but I’m thinking Lois was involved… not all the strips are in the collected volume, you know. But it’s too little too late and by the early 2000s Mad Wimmin Books is out of business. Just like all those beautiful stores where I wasted my youth. Just like the wasteland of Newport News with its big box stores, one after another.

And of course I bought this book from Medusa.com which is, ironically, making Bechdel’s characters accessible to a wider audience (like straight, male anthropologists living in military towns in the south) not to mention preserving them for future generations of lesbians to rediscover. From the very beginning of the series the author demonstrates a keen awareness of how the mainstream cuts both ways for gays and lesbians. Like in a 1987 strip when at a Gay Pride parade Mo frets over its undercurrents of conservatism as the freaks are joined by Catholics, a men’s choir singing Yankee Doodle, and one group proudly waving a banner that reads “Le$bian Investment Bankers.”

Bechdel writes in her introduction to the Essential Dykes that her goal was always to speak the unspeakable, to depict the undepicted for a community that was starved for representations of itself. “Once you speak the unspeakable… it becomes spoken! Conventional. Boring! Have I churned out episodes of this comic strip every two weeks for decades merely to prove that we’re the same as everyone else?”

By my reading what is revealed in the changing position of queer folk in contemporary American society is the great diversity of this group. Their lack of political consensus is matched by the lack of consensus among racial groups or along class lines. This all comes to a head for the Dykes in a most interesting way as Ginger must confront an outspoken conservative in the classroom, Cynthia, who then comes out to her. This is after George W. Bush’s reelection and just as frequently the two are feuding over ideologies as the elder woman is taking the younger woman under her wing, inviting her over for Christmas dinner when her parents excommunicate her, and writing her letters of recommendation when she wants to join the CIA.

A word about the art. It begins as, shall we say, competent. Some characters and panels simply fall flat. Yet even at this early date Bechdel’s greatest strength is the ability to convincingly create a racially diverse cast and make it look easy. But the emotional depth is limited and some of the characters just look kind of dumb. Gradually the style becomes more confident until sometime in the early 1990s when everything clicks and the strip takes on beautiful sophistication. By the middle of the decade Bechdel’s art is nothing short of sublime. This is the style she would use in Fun Home, but the memoir adds ink wash for shading whereas for the strip everything is accomplished with pure black and cross hatching.

Comparisons worth making: Like Doonesbury or For Better or For Worse, Dykes follows a large cast through time as they age and mature. Time flows in this strip and often enough it is marked by popular culture and presidential politics. Unlike Doonesbury, which I read as more satirical, the political editorializing is closer to the surface in Dykes. Politics for Bechdel is a tragedy (played for laughs – black humor), for Gary Trudeau it is a farce. If there is a true political ancestor to Dykes it would be Sylvia, which is unabashedly feminist and pretty damn funny too. Unlike For Better or For Worse, which follows the foibles of a family and their extended social network, Dykes is full of hot sex. Plus foibles and family.

Late in the book Lois and Mo see each other in the supermarket. Mo is trying to chose between fair trade raw cane sugar and organic raw cane sugar. “Eat pesticides? Or exploit workers?” she thinks when Lois appears and says, “Hey, you look kind of like a very good friend of mine, only older.” Time passes and the artist marks it with lines under their eyes. With parents that die. With cancer. With babies that become teenagers. But to reverse the flow of time one need only turn the pages from left to right and all your friends are young again. There’s a great seduction in that.

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The curious can view this video where Bechdel clicks through some slides, most of which are featured in the book, for about 20 minutes. Superfans can stick around for the next 20 minutes or so as she takes questions from the audience.

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A cultural anthropologist, I am frequently called upon to teach biological anthropology. This has always been in the context of introductory level courses: human evolution or general anthropology with an evolution component. After stumbling out of the gate, I have become comfortable wearing the evolution and ecology hat. In particular I find pleasure in arranging the topic of human origins as a narrative. You could say that my approach definitely betrays my bias as one more skilled in the humanistic side of anthropology. Yet I am very cognizant of the fact that many students are drawn to courses like Introduction to Anthropology because it qualifies as a science in their distribution requirements, but does not require math or a lab.

I’m not getting saddled with a blow off class. I’m going to hit ‘em hard with evolutionary theory and basic genetics. Evolution I can do because I’ve read Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, and Mayr. But structure and function of DNA isn’t exactly my forte. So I need something challenging for my kids, but not out of my league. That’s why I require The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA as supplement to the more usual textbook fare. At just under 150 pages, all illustrated, Stuff can, in an evening or two, easily be digested by anyone who passed high school biology.

There’s also a lot here that will appeal to comic book fans. Author Mark Schultz, writer and illustrator for the venerable Prince Valient strip, brings wit and a snappy pace to otherwise dry material. He did an outstanding interview on NPR Science Friday (which is how I discovered the book) where he talks about the medium of comics and how he approached nonfiction material. Illustrators Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon are award winners, having taken home two Eisners for their art in Alan Moore’s completely awesome super-hero-crime-procedural Top Ten. Their ink brush lines bring a fun, cartoony look making the book a delight to look at without distracting from the lessons at hand. The book’s greatest strength comes from the aide the Cannon’s art provides to visualizing things like cell division and protein synthesis. Right-brained learners rejoice!

Our story concerns an alien race known as the Squintch. These sentient sea cucumber-like creatures are beset by genetic malady that threatens their very existence. You see, the Squintch are asexual reproducers and so reap none of the benefits of recombining their DNA through sex to produce genetic variation. An alien scientist, Bloort 183, is sent to Earth to seek out a cure for the Squintch disease by observing the evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction. The novel follows Bloort’s presentation to his alien king from the structure of the DNA molecule, to the production of gametes through meiosis, Mendelian principles of inheritance, the practical applications of genetics, and how genetics has contributed to our understanding of human evolution. It sounds pretty silly, but as a framing device the story never really gets in the way of the information.

As anyone who has tried to teach evolution at a state school in the American south can testify, many students begin the semester skeptical of evolution because they perceive it as being in opposition to their religious practices. From the passive resistance of refusing to turn in assignments, to argumentative confrontation, to self-imposed cleavages between public and private life I’ve seen the gamut of student response to the material. Genetics does not carry the same stigma as Darwinian evolution. Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose elegant pea plant experiments are in every textbook, makes a fine foil to the demonized Charles Darwin. The Stuff of Life helps me make a more compelling case for evolution by natural selection because genetics is a back door into many of the same conclusions but without all the cultural baggage.

While the first three chapters are all biology, chapters four and five are explicitly useful in an anthropology class as the topic shifts from the role of DNA among all life on Earth, to why genetics is of great consequences for humanity. The Human Genome Project, recombinant DNA technology, gene therapy, GMO crops, and cloning are all touched on in the chapter on applied research. The final chapter on what genetics tells us about the human past makes a fine segue back to the material covered in the regular textbook. Here the book discusses the measurement of mutations on the Y chromosome and in mitochondiral DNA to show that modern humans originated in Africa where genetic diversity is the greatest. As a 2009 publication it covers the relationship between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis, but in a way that is not contridicted by the 2010 sequencing of the Neaderthal genome.

Last semester students in my Introduction to Anthropology class provided me with some written feedback about their impressions of the book, in what way it was (or was not) useful to them, and the connection they saw between it and the rest of the course material. These I edited for brevity to share here on SM.

Students who felt week in science immediately latched onto the book:

Biology, it’s a class that most (if not, all) students take in either high school or college. However, regardless of mandatory exposure, many individuals still leave the classroom barely remembering the information being fed to them. I, myself, was not an exception to this statistic. All I could recall about biology was cutting frogs open and thinking that was cool or swabbing water fountains and finding out that they are disgusting, even much more than a toilet seat in the girls’ bathroom. The graphic novel, “The Stuff of Life” by Mark Schultz, is a book that should be a necessity in a college or high school science classroom along with the standard textbook.

Many identified the illustrations as the strongest character of the work:

The incorporation of illustrations into this book made it that much easier to follow. These images are not typical comic pictures but detailed images that describe exactly the point Shultz is trying to get across. Each picture is focusing more on a specific piece going from a broad perspective and zooming in on a specific one. Visuals like these make it easier for the reader to approach the problems with ease. In my opinion, this book put genetics and DNA into a whole different perspective for me. My major is biology and we are also learning about these exact same principles that were in this book. I have read this book multiple times to help me with my homework. This book is much easier to understand than a text book, while still retaining the same information.

Some students found that the book offered a good chance for review:

The fact that “The Stuff of Life” was a comic book definitely eased the actual read. Genetics can be a dry topic, especially for those not scientifically gifted. The comic book theme did not take away from the solemnity of the book; although the comic relief was also helpful for the few times when I felt like dozing off. The novel, however, is not written on a “young reader” level; I began the book with a fairly deep knowledge of genetics, and had to reread several parts in order to truly grasp what it was saying. I feel that this book would be beneficial for upper level biology courses or even introductory genetic classes; I actually even recommended the book to my molecular biology teacher to use in her future classes.

Students liked the narrative structure:

I also liked that at the beginning of every “section” there was an overview of what would be covered. As well as after each “section” it went back and had a review of the key points with the alien king. This was like a conclusion paragraph at the end of every chapter in a text book. Having the alien king explain it again gave an almost “dumbed-down” version very easy to understand. Having a glossary in the back is also a great asset to the book, because that serves as a great study aid.

Some students gave the book mixed reviews:

Schultz’s introduction to “The Stuff of life” is not very strong. The book jumps around too much for me. In the book, Schultz immediately discusses numerous concepts, facts, and terms at a rapid pace. He does not always allow his reader to grasp the important information being conveyed. However, the book’s illustrations are very precise. They give the reader a visual image of the important concepts. Though if there were fewer illustrations crammed onto a page, then the book would feel less cluttered and perhaps less jumpy. I recommend “The Stuff of Life” to anyone who enjoys science and especially genetics. The illustrations make a very difficult subject more approachable. One will definitely appreciate the book if he or she is in a genetics class.

Other students were even less satisfied:

I feel that the subject matters that are discussed should not be paired up with comic illustrations. For me this made it more confusing for multiple reasons. One, the amount of information crammed into a 150 page book was a bit overwhelming. The second issue I had was that some space was taken up by ineffective comic strips. Most of the comic strips didn’t seem to help me understand the information any better then if I would have read a regular school book, internet article, or magazine. Finally I found that the amount of science jargon was a bit much considering this is a comic book. Yes there is a glossary in the back of the book with some of the words defined, but it is a lot easier to follow along when something is defined as you are reading.

But a few skeptics came around in the end:

When I realized this book was a comic book, it threw me off a little. I honestly wasn’t looking forward to reading it. I am not interested in comics, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The text is full of information pertaining to all aspects of genetics, but it is full of hidden jokes and puns. Reading this story made me want to learn more about DNA. The fact that it is being narrated by an alien makes it even better. I am glad “The Stuff of Life” was included in the required reading for Anthropology.

The Stuff of Life definitely helps me as a teacher by providing a much needed aide in an area outside my expertise. Last month saw the debut of the sequel, Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth, which I’d be interested in taking a look at if I could get hooked up with a free copy somehow.

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Tune in for our next installment, “Illustrated Wimmin,” as I tackle Alison Bechdel’s cult classic, Dykes to Watch Out For.